Year’s End: Attack of the Sappy

I wrote and scrapped two essays for today’s post.

One was a recollection of a humorous holiday incident from my misspent youth, a long day’s sleigh ride into night playing Santa Claus on the disgruntled streets of South Philadelphia in halcyon days of 1985. But there’s more to it than just being chased around my Dad’s old Chevy – in full Santa gear, no less – by a drunken and angry client who’d mixed up his scheduling with my dispatcher, and the time’s not right.

The other was painfully maudlin and self-indulgent, the sort of thing that’s best left to emo kids and opium-addled Romantic poets getting their proto-Goth on for the sake of poofy shirt-wearing future generations. Now’s not the time for that one, either.

So I’m left with this: the end of a year, and of a year’s writing. Good times, bad times, everything in between. I was named one of the 20 best at what I do by Gamasutra. That was a high. So was seeing the cover art for the upcoming paperback edition of Firefly Rain, finally understanding the meaning of a phrase I’d come up with nine years ago and turning it into a story that an editor pounced on; wrapping up the manuscript on a long-running collaboration with a friend and getting enthusiastic response back from readers; fusing my words with gameplay and level design and everything else in the looming behemoth of gaming awesomeness that is Splinter Cell: Conviction. And there were the dry spells, the long nights when all the words were seized by the day job, the bland rejections that seemed like they’d been written for someone else’s work. The weeks on the road, when writing took me to odd hotel rooms in odder places. The novels started and scrapped, or set aside until inspiration wandered back and the marketing department stopped pinging me for last-minute revisions.

In short, it’s a writer’s year. In retrospect, I could not ask for anything to be different, nor should I. This year’s obstacles are hopefully grist for next year’s mill – or at the very least, material for good stories to be told somewhere, sometime. Here, for example, once I’ve had enough time to figure out what they mean, or what they were trying to teach me. Or maybe, just to find the joke in them. The world can use a few more good jokes, I think. So can most collections of writers, especially when we talk about The Craft. We’re a terribly serious lot when it comes to that sort of thing, alas. We sometimes forget that for all the torment of writing, self-imposed and otherwise, when the words flow right and when the reader gets it, this whole writer thing is an awful lot of fun.

So try to have fun with it. Maybe that’s what 2009 was trying to tell me. Maybe I’ll figure that out for next year, too.

Until then, well, it’s been a year. Thanks for sharing it.